The face is lean, ascetic and high-boned. The eyes seldom smile. The
body is compact and erect. And the voice is drawn up from the deeps, a nasal
burr basted with eternity and as sweetly lethargic as a hypnotist's.

Sir Alec Guinness has been variously dubbed "The Invisible
Man" and "The Celestial Absence". Kenneth Tynan
once pondered the total ano­nymity of the face: "The number of false
arrests following the circulation of his description would break all rec­ords."
Guinness has disappeared ego-first into such roles as a man in a white suit,
a vacuum salesman, an invisible wizard, and the ghost of Freud. And owing to
a lost birth certificate there is no bureaucratic record of his arrival in
the world (in Marylebone, West Lon­don, April 2, 1914). So officially, with
an irony that would have delighted Ea­ling Comedy,
Alec Guinness does not exist.

Yet here he is in 1983, aged 69, alive and palpable, scooping in fame
and greenbacks from the Star Wars
series – can two percent ever have seemed so little and proved so much? – and
bag­ging equal quantities of kudos on the small screen as John Le Carré's long-running George Smiley. Guinness: "One
became an actor in order to es­cape from oneself."

And so the incredible shrinking pres­ence was born. "Guinlessness," a new British ad-campaign word to
denote the state-of-distress of those out of the dark ale, keynotes Guinness
the actor. When the glass is empty, it seems a perplexing sight. As Wormold in Our Man
In Havana Guinness prompted the question, "How still should a still
cen­ter be?" Noel Coward, Ralph Richard­son and Ernie Kovacs all rotated
through the movie like mad magnifi­cent satellites. Guinness crouched, a
vacuum cleaner salesman, deep in his own vacuum. Every five minutes an
eyebrow would bob. Every ten, the voice would rouse itself to a new high –
say middle G.

●

But like a chameleon, moments of unbelievable inertia in Guinness alter­nate
with equally unbelievable trans­figurations. The colors change, the eye
flickers, a new challenge is scented and the tongue – snap! crunch! – darts
out.

In The Bridge on the River Kwai Guin­ness won the best deserved Oscar of the
1950s as Colonel Nicholson, a potty vainglory shining from his pigeon chest,
the voice adenoidal and emphatic like a drunken pedant's. the walk (after a
session in hothouse soli­tary) a sheer-will effort of the knees. There was
Guinness as Fagin, where the heavy dark-eyebrowed
face always sought a lower plane than the airward
gesturing arms. And Guinness was a stubble-bearded shambles as painter Gulley
Jimson in The Horse's Mouth (which
he scripted himself). It remains perhaps the best sketch of artist-as-Bo­hemian
in all cinema: neither Titan (Heston as
Michelangelo), nor martyr (Douglas as Van Gogh), but a human bag of bones on
comic-visionary overdrive.

All the more bizarre that Guinness spent his childhood being told by ev­eryone
that he'd never be an actor. He lost his father, a bank director, early.
("I only saw him four of five times.") He spent his formative years
being toted from one resort to another along the English Channel coast by his
house-moving mother. Erupting into showbiz as a messenger in Macbeth at his first hoarding school,
Pembroke College, Guinness had to arrive on stage breath­less after a lap
round the football field (it's unclear if this was the shortest route or a Stanislavskian warm-up) and then couldn't sputter out
more than one broken syllable per breath. "You'll never make an actor,
Guinness," said his headmaster.

Decades later London reviewers said much the same of his Macbethat the Royal Court Theater. Red-bearded
like a man in a bear suit, Guinness ooh'd and aye'd with spirited but doomed vigor opposite Simone Signoret's equally eccentric Lady M, who looked and
sounded as if she'd arrived in Dunsinane after a
bad night on the ferry from Cherbourg.

It was John Gielgud who first had confidence
in Guinness' thespian po­tential. The year was 1932. He rescued the
18-year-old from his slough of de­spondency as an ad-writer in London,
earning £1 (then $3.50) per week in his first job. "Get thee to Martita Hunt," Gielgud
seems to have cried, and Guin­ness went to the famed Martita for coaching. Shortly, he heard from her
the familiar litany: "You'll never make an actor, Mr. Guinness."

No one casting an eye today at Sir A's basilisk immaculacy – the
polished dome, the 24-hour suit and tie, the air of a benevolent and
well-bred clubman – would credit the greenhorn Guin­ness. He tramped from
audition to au­dition in the early 1930s, getting much the same treatment as
Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. "We're
looking for someone taller. " "We're looking for someone older...
" "We're looking for someone else!"

In 1934 he was perfunctorily bap­tized in the cinema. Guinness' first
movie immersion – and the only one prior to his starring role in Great
Expectations twelve years later – was in a mu­sical directed by Victor Saville and star­ring Evelyn Laye, Evensong. He was an extra and the pay was minimal.
But the producer, prophetically, was Michael Balcon, later to be production chief at Guinness'
great postwar alma mater,Ealing Studios.

Even the winning of a two-year scholarship to the Fay Compton Studio of
Dramatic Art in 1934 failed to open any professional sesames on the stage.
Guinness relates how, through zeal for his craft, he would tail pedestrians
to and fro across London, mimicking their gait and gestures and no doubt
alarming passing policemen. He was soon doing this barefoot, furthermore, to
save shoe leather. His daily diet, refined by pov­erty, was "a green
apple, a glass of milk and a bun." John Gielgud,
embarrassed one night in his dressing room by this nude-footed supplicant,
offered him a £25 loan. Guinness, too proud to take it, turned and left.

Cut to the glittering lights of 1936 London at night. Guinness' steps
take him past a theater. He turns back and goes in. He asks for work at the
box office. Bemusement of box-office lady. The manager enters and gives him
an on-the-spot audition. He is rewarded with three small roles: a Chinese
coolie, a French pirate, a British sailor. Guin­ness the chameleon is born.
Three months later he is playing Osric to Gielgud'sHamlet.
In 1938, aged 24, he is playing Hamlet,
at the Old Vic under Tyrone Guthrie's direction. (Gielgud
is somewhere seething).

In the same year he married actress Merula Salaman, wooed and won amid the paint-and-canvas
floods of a pro­duction of Noah. He entered the Navy as an ordinary
seaman in 1941, was commissioned within a year, super­vised the shipping of
butter and hay to the Yugoslav partisans and became the first Allied
serviceman to land in Sicily (by accident: the Admiral had mistimed his
disembarkation). After the wars he returned to stomp the boards.

Guinness' stage performances – he played Richard II, a much praised Fool to Olivier's King Learand the part that inadvertently hurled him
into cinema, Herbert Pocket in his own dramatiza­tion of Great
Expectations – were al­ready
sorting him into the two-tone actor we know today from cinema and TV. There
is Guinness the Saintly Transparence. (Both Hamlet and Richard II struck critics as honest
and lucid if a touch underwhelming). And there is Guinness the Master of Dis­guise.
(His Fool was praised for its nov­elty and vitality, and his Pocket, known to
us from David Lean's film, is a quiffed
and shiny-faced dandy of radi­ant alertness).

Today Guinness the Saintly Tran­sparence appears as Obi Wan Kenobi and George Smiley: both sages, one dark who
knows of light, one light who knows of dark.

This pedestalled virtuousness has its
admirers. Star Wars fans, especially, have written to Guinness by the
hun­dreds. Many of them are lured, admit­tedly, by the attraction of an actor
who owns two percent of the wealth of Croesus (aka George
Lucas). He gets begging letters by the sackful. But
there are also bug-eyed and eccentric devotional correspondents. "Before
Star Wars we didn't believe in any­thing," said one
letter-writer. "Now we believe there is something called a force for
good, and you represent it, and could you please come to America and stay
with us."

Guinness' totally credible self-ef­facement makes him probably the only
British actor-knight who could get away with a role like Kenobi. Olivier would bray it brass-lunged to the moon, or
give us his late-favored, high-treble wheedling mode (cf. The Boys From Brazil, The Jazz
Singer,the TV Lear). Gielgud would
turn the speeches into cantabilesfor the vocal cords. And Ri­chardson would
be a potty prophet sur­prised somewhere between Mount Olympus and a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Guinness inhabits wisdom and good­ness
with lean authority, ambrosial voice, and no fuss.

But Guinness drunk straight in Star Wars or Smiley's
People still doesn't have the same kick or tingle as Guin­ness spiked
with character interest. And the actor himself may have sensed this early on
in his move into movies: he challenged an incredulous David Lean to give him
the role of Fagin in Oliver Twist,only
Guinness' third film. Almost alone among film actors, Guin­ness can assume
the paraphernalia of make-up and funny voices and eccen­tric walks without
losing a molecule of credibility. He never allows the weight of disguise to
panic him into a matching hyperbole of voice and gesture. Guin­ness' Fagin is
more superfine than Dickens'. He makes evil seem a prod­uct of deep and
cankerous melancholy. Darken his eyes, stoop his head, and contort the voice
(as also in The Ladykillers,where he
played a dark-side-of-the-moon spoof on AlastairSim), and the void of the Guinness persona sud­denly
fills with something magical: not a box of tricks but a true alchemy of
personality, both funny and saturnine.

Rogues, vagabonds, dotty aristocrats and all-sorts of eccentrics duly
came Guinness' way. He played eight of them in one film in Kind Hearts and
Coronets,where the
actor's quite aston­ishing refusal to mug and vamp re­sulted in comic cameos
as subtle and rich as a vintage wine tasting. It's this asceticism, even in
the midst of naked vaudeville, that seems superhuman to onlookers, and that
lands Guinness the roles like Kenobi, Smiley, the Pope (in Brother Sun, Sister Moon),or
the heroic Cardinal in The Prisoner. And it would have landed him, if
fate had fallen a different way, with Gandhi.
He was offered the role in 1952 by producer-di­rector Gabriel Pascal, but thought the part unplayable and
the film unmake­able. Thirty years later Gandhi has
landed heavily in our laps, and despite the Oscars there are some (not a
million miles from this typewriter) who still agree with Guinness.

In the 1950s, whenever British cin­ema gave Guinness a furlough from
false moustaches and weirdly barbered accents, they shunted him into Little
Big Man roles. He was the lowly labora­tory assistant with the great idea in The
Man in the White Suit. He was the meek and mild detective genius in Father
Brown. He was a naval nitwit who rose to the occasion in Barnacle
Bill. And in The Bridge on the River Kwai,he was a dotty martinet
who turned hero. And then back into a dotty martinet.

For Ealing Studios, who he served for a
decade from 1948 to 1957, Guin­ness was the Everyman of Little Eng­land. Or
rather Super-Everyman. For not only could he play anything and everything
that came on two feet, but he was also, if one pinpointed a spe­cialty, the
common man with the un­common touch and thus a paradigm for post-imperial
Britain itself. Littleness was glorified in Ealing
comedy as the brave and resilient David to whatever Goliath happened to be
around. The tiny community versus government bu­reaucracy (Passport to Pimlico,
The Titfield Thunderbolt);the
lone genius versus the might of scientific conserva­tism (The Man in the White Suit);and
even, on the far side of the law, the diffident bank clerk and his pal (Guin­ness
and Stanley Holloway) going crim­inal and giving a beneficent cautionary tweak
to the strong arm of the law in The Lavender Hill Mob.

As with any major movie star, the kind of roles that began to tumble
into Guinness' lap – especially in his golden decade, the 1950s – helped
define, by the market force principle, the special chemistry and tensions of
his personal­ity. It's English reticence that breeds England's greatest
actors. Like the shy child who searches delightedly in the dressing-up trunk
and finds a voice and an outgoing personality as soon as he puts on a
costume, English repression is the tinder to great English acting. (Even Olivier, the extrovert of the pack, is notoriously
interview-shy and protective of his private life.)

Guinness' unassuming, genial, and bleakly ironic natural persona (irony
is another protection for the shy) makes him an English version of mild-man­nered
Clark Kent. And just as reticence in an actor's life fires dreams of flam­boyance,
so in Guinness' films his Clark Kent variations were often the launching-pad
to explosions of oddball genius, courage, determination or sheer
eccentricity. Is it a wimp? Is it a boffin? No,
it's Super-Everyman!

His protean invisibility needs the microscopic eye of cinema (or TV) to
follow it. The progress must be charted from the first rebellious eyeblink to the final crazed apocalypse. (As it is bril­liantly
in Mackendrick'sThe Man in the White Suit,with the escalating shadow­play Expressionism of its visuals match­ing
Guinness' upward arc of boldness and desperation). On stage Guinness'
miniaturist style is often simply swal­lowed up in the maws of the
proscenium. When he played Lawrence of Arabia in Terence Rattigan's 1959 play Ross (shortly before
playing Prince Faisal to O'Toole's Lawrence on screen), the combination of
introverted hero and introverted actor made Guin­ness an alarming and almost
total vac­uum. Somewhere down there on stage, there was a burnoose making
noises.

Likewise in the early 1970s, Guin­ness hopped on board the role of the
blind barrister Dad in John Mortimer's autobiographical play A Voyage Round
My Father. Plant on stage an actor whose technique is tuned to the
micro-processes of cinema, and you may end up with something semi-invisible
wired for sound. The only great film actor I have known to disappear more com­pletely
than Guinness on stage was Pe­ter Finch. In Tony Richardson's pro­duction of The
Seagull in the 60s Finch played Trigorin; and
you couldn't be­lieve, as these empty sounds and ges­tures sailed from
beneath a straw boater, that an actor so dense-packed with tiny idioms and
mannerist life-forms on screen could be so uninhab­ited, like a hollow drum,
on stage.

After the death of Ealing Studios at the end
of the 1950s – an organization that had spent ten years custom-build­ing
comic roles for its greatest star – Guinness became that endangered spe­cies,
a freelance actor. The screen career has been notably directionless ever
since, with the consolation that it has also at times been wildly unpredict­able.

He sported rousing red whiskers and a chortle of a Scottish accent as
the hellraising Colonel in Tunes of Glory (1960).
He unmothballed his naval uni­form yet again (cf. The Captain's Para­dise, Barnacle
Bill)for HMS
Defiant (1961). He was an Arab prince in brownface
in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a Roman Emperor in Sam Bron­ston'sThe Fall Of The Roman Empire(1963), a Russian father in Doctor
Zhivago(1965), a charlatan Major in Pe­ter
Glenville's Bermuda (alias Graham Greene's Haiti) in The Comedians (1967).
He was King Charles in Cromwell (1970), the ghost of Jacob Marley in Scrooge
(1970), the Pope in Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), a rau­cous,
pop-eyed and robotic Fuhrer in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), and a
blind butler in Murder by Death (1974). Apart perhaps from a deaf
Puerto Rican nuclear scientist, was there any role left for Guinness to
essay?

Well, there was Star Wars. Midway through blind butler duty on
the Neil Simon whodunnit, Sir Alec felt his way back to his trailer
in Hollywood and discovered a script. He picked it up quizzically, knowing
George Lucas by reputation and by American Graffiti. And then, "I
saw it was science fiction and I thought, `Oh God'." But a read-through
and a later meeting with Lucas cast a cheery glow over the project for him,
and he was soon donning the floor-length Kenobi robes and the white beard
indispensable to ageless seers, and was putting pen to paper for that
historic two percent of the producer's profits.

Since Star Wars,Guinness
has been sparing of big-screen appearances: partly because the small screen
has si­phoned him off in two marathon stints in John Le Carré'sTinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People,and partly be­cause medical problems with his left
eye, following a hemorrhage of the ret­ina, have forced him under doctor's or­ders
to minimize his exposure to spot­lights.

Nonetheless, Guinness notched up a vigorous scene-stealing tug of war
with Ricky Schroder in Little Lord Fauntleroy; lent momentary buoyancy to Raise
the Titanic;and
quipped away (viz ze Viennese accent)
through a king-size cheroot as Freud's ghost in Lovesick.

Almost as intriguing as the screen roles Guinness accepted over the
years are the ones he turned down or just missed. Not only Gandhi,but Hitch­cock's I
Confess (he was too busy with Ealing at the
time) and Bryan Forbes's Seance on a Wet
Afternoon,which
at one script stage was fashioned as a story of two homosexual lovers,
specially de­signed for Guinness and Tom Courte­nay. Guinness declined.

Guinness's instinct for self-protec­tion shows in other ways. He has fa­vored
certain directors and worked with them again and again: Robert Hamen (four times), David Lean (five times),
Ronald Neame (four times) and Peter Glenville
(three times). Only in Glenville's case has the loyalty seemed dras­tically
misplaced. The Prisoner,in
which soutined Cardinal Guinness bat­tled eyeball
to eyeball with Communist police chief Jack Hawkins, was at least a success d'estime. But Hotel Paradiso and The Comedians wowed neither
press nor public and punched big torpedo-holes in Guinness's mid-60s ca­reer.

Nonetheless an actor festooned with honors can't complain if he finds
him­self limping into port now and then for repairs. Knighthood came
Guinness' way in 1959 ("Down on your knees, Mr
Guinness; Arise, Sir Alec"). Two years earlier he had won the Best Actor
Oscar for Kwai. And in 1980 he
received a special Academy Award for "advancing the art of screen acting
through a host of memorable and distinguished perform­ances."

"I suppose for an actor," Guinness has said, "the only
benefit in growing old is learning to pare down one's per­formance: learning
to cut out the flourishes. That's what I'm trying to do.

Too true. Sometimes Guinness' per­formances seem pared down to the bone
marrow, and flourishes are exactly what his bleached ascetic presence could
do with. In front of the Le Carré television turn, one shakes in appalled wonder at that subtly exophthalmic face: the hornrimmed
spectacles, lenses catching the light, are often the liveliest features. Is
Guinness' per­formance as George Smiley acting or non-acting? Is it l'être or néant?

Guinness resolutely denies that he ever merely sits back and plays
"Alec Guinness" in a stage or screen role. (Of Our Man in Havana:"Some critics said I
was simply playing myself. How could that be? I am not a vacuum-cleaner salesman").
Yet if there's an Achilles heel in his work, it's the odor of safety and
sanctity which seems to say, de­spite all the dizzying changes of role,
"I won't allow myself to look foolish; I won't leap further than I have
to; I won't risk a broken bone or a belly-flop or a false note." In this
he's the oppo­site of Olivier, the Olympian risk-taker. And he doesn't have in compensation the
glorious innate eccentricity of Ri­chardson or the lyrical sumptuousness of Gielgud.

What he does have is sly wisdom and a possibly unique flair for
catching sub­tle colors and tints that can turn charac­ter roles into living,
breathing, center-stage personalities. He knows that characterization should
never sell out to caricature. And he also knows that in cinema, as in other
walks of life, souls shouldn't be cheaply sold for shekels. He said in
December 1977, after the opening of Star Wars: "My only worry with Lucas is that the cinema system
will force him into a series of follow-ups to Star Wars. He should
resist that."